Perspective - (2022) Volume 4, Issue 2
Received: 30-Mar-2022, Manuscript No. JBTC-22-13173; Editor assigned: 01-Apr-2022, Pre QC No. JBTC-22-13173 (PQ); Reviewed: 15-Apr-2022, QC No. JBTC-22-13173; Revised: 22-Apr-2022, Manuscript No. JBTC-22-13173 (R); Published: 29-Apr-2022, DOI: 10.35841/jbtc-4.2.07
The study of how people perceive and alter their environments across cultures is known as ethno ecology. It has typically concentrated on language examinations of names for plants, animals, habitats, and other ecological phenomena in an attempt to uncover underlying mental structures that influence human behavior.
Dr. Hugh Propene, an agronomist and tropical soil scientist who has worked for the University of Florida, the National Science Foundation, and the National Research Council, pioneered ethno ecology with some of his early publications. Dr. Harold Conklin, a cognitive anthropologist who conducted substantial linguistic and ethno-ecological study in Southeast Asia, has also collaborated with Propene.
Harold Conklin created the term ethno ecology when he labeled his method as “ethno ecological” in his 1954 dissertation, “The Relation of the Hanunoo Culture to the Plant World.” He began teaching at Columbia University after receiving his PhD and continued his studies with the Hanno. Conklin’s initial ethno-ecological investigations were published in 1955. His research on “Hanno Color Categories” helped scientists better comprehend the relationship between classification systems and cultural worldviews. Conklin discovered in this experiment that due to their distinct classification systems, people in different cultures recognise colours differently.
He discovered that Hanno employs two colour levels in his findings. Darkness, brightness, redness, and greenness make up the first level of colour terminology. The second level was more abstract, with hundreds of colour classifications including texture, shininess, and object wetness. Other anthropologists struggled to grasp the Hanno’s colour classification system because they frequently applied their own colour standards to the Hanno’s. Conklin’s research not only revolutionised ethno ecology, but it also contributed to the development of the idea that other cultures conceive the world in their own terms, reducing ethnocentrism in western societies.
Alternative researchers like Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven wanted to learn more about other environmental classification systems and compare them to Western scientific taxonomies. Conklin is credited for coining the term ethno ecology in 1954, while being most closely identified with the creation of the ethno scientific approach. Given the precedent set by terminology like ethno botany and ethno zoology, ethno ecology would seem to pertain to the study of local views of ecological processes including nutrient cycling, vegetation succession, and plant-animal interactions.
A growing number of scholars offer a distinct definition, referring to local people’s perceptions and management of the complex and coevolved interactions between manmade and natural ecosystems’ cultural, ecological, and economic components. This new discipline, like ethnobiology as a whole, is interested in the intersection of knowledge, practice and production, and is geared toward conservation and community development research. According to Mexican ecologist Victor Toledo, ethno ecology’s goal should be to evaluate the ecological impact of people’s intellectual and practical activities when appropriating natural resources.
Although knowledge and know-how are mentioned in the definition of ethnobiology, ethno ecologists distinguish between an ethno biological corpus, which is a collection of local people’s concepts, perceptions, and symbolic representations of nature, and praxis, which is the art, science, and skill of appropriating nature and biological resources.
People use their intellectual understanding of nature to everyday chores such as farming, collecting, and hunting for subsistence and commercial purposes, demonstrating the link between knowledge and practice in production. Ethno ecologists study how the environment, knowledge, technology, social organization, and values of local peoples have coevolved to create management of manmade and natural ecosystems and the biological creatures they house.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Citation: Siqi Wang (2022). Peoples have coevolved to Create Management of Manmade and Natural Ecosystems. BioEng BioElectron. 4:07.
Copyright: © Siqi Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
